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Topic: Is Apple beating Microsoft (Read 10841 times)

I guess apple won't be able to beat microsoft. Apple is pretty much in demand but microsoft did contribute a lot. Its just the fact that apple offer good design, but many people still choose microsoft. Oh well, we all have different preferences.

When Microsoft stock was at a record high in 1999, and its market capitalization was nearly $620 billion, the notion that Apple Computer would ever be bigger — let alone twice as big — was laughable. Apple was teetering on bankruptcy. And Microsoft’s operating system was so dominant in personal computers, then the center of the technology universe, that the government deemed the company an unlawful monopoly.

This week, both Microsoft and Apple unveiled their latest earnings, and the once unthinkable became reality: Apple’s market capitalization hit $683 billion, more than double Microsoft’s current value of $338 billion.

At Apple’s earnings conference call on Tuesday, its chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, called the quarter “historic” and the earnings “amazing.” Noting that Apple sold more than 34,000 iPhones every hour, 24 hours a day, during the quarter, he said the sheer volume of sales was “hard to comprehend.”

Apple earned $18 billion in the quarter — more than any company ever in a single quarter — on revenue of $75 billion. Its free cash flow of $30 billion in one quarter was more than double what IBM, another once-dominant tech company, generates in a full year, noted a senior Bernstein analyst, Toni Sacconaghi. The stock jumped more than 5 percent, even as the broader market was down.

A far more subdued Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, who is trying to transform the company and reduce its dependence on the Windows operating system, referred to “challenges.” Microsoft’s revenue was barely one-third of Apple’s, and operating income of $7.8 billion was less than a quarter of Apple’s. Microsoft shares dropped over 9 percent as investors worried about its aging personal computer software market.

For decades, Microsoft Windows users were locked in an seemingly eternal debate with fans of Apple's Macs over who had the superior platform - a conflict spurred by the very public rivalry between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs . Around the mid-aughts, things eventually settled out into kind of a stable duopoly, as Apple found its niche as the makers of premium hardware for the culture-conscious, and Windows PCs earned a rep as the computer of the mainstream, especially for gamers and office workers.

When it comes to PC hardware, Microsoft has always tried to do something different. The Surface and Surface Pro helped popularize the idea of hybrid laptops that could also be used as tablets. The Surface Book took that idea a step further with a bigger screen, a unique hinge and more powerful hardware. But with the Surface Laptop, which was leaked last night and officially announced this morning, it's almost as if Microsoft is going back to basics. It's basically a straightforward notebook, albeit one with the Microsoft's slick Surface aesthetic.

Microsoft mostly sells software, Apple mostly sells devices. But of course, this depends on what exactly you're referring to. At face value, this is asking if one company is beating the other. Not if Microsoft Windows is beating out macOS, or if Microsoft devices are selling more than Apple (lol).